The folks at Google have done it again. This time they are turning schoolbuses into rolling study halls.
After the cable cutting by Google and government officials took place at St. Stephen Middle school, the countdown began to the first rolling study halls in South Carolina.
Google paid $180,000 to equip 28 school buses in 6 lower income schools in Berkeley County with wifi.
Aniya Robinson is a student at St. Stephen Middle. “You can’t access everything that you need on your phone so we have a Chromebook that helps me to do certain activities our school wants us to do.”
The longer drive home buses will have teachers from the College of Charleston riding along to help kids with their homework and even computer coding skills.
Aniya Robinson’s friend Angelina Wall says she is excited about being part of a first for South Carolina. “You tell people you live in St. Stephen’s and they don’t really know where that is because it’s a small town. I think that this right here is pretty big and the name St.Stephen’s will kind of be a little bit everywhere now.”
Senator Larry Grooms spoke at the ceremony. He went to middle school at St Stephen Middle. “To have access to the Internet is to have access to the world, so what this does is, Google allows these children to have access to the world.”
Google also provided Chromebooks to more than 1700 students to use on the “rolling study halls.” Aniya’s mom Candance Ravenell says this is an amazing opportunity. “She’s even said for the last few years, ‘I want to work for Google.’ and I thought, how perfect that you want to work for Google and just look at what they’re doing now.”
Lilyn Hester is a spokesperson for Google. She says preparing kids for tech jobs is one of the reasons for this program. “And what we want to do is really get them ready for those 21st-century jobs. As you know, here in the Lowcountry there are those who may not have Internet access, may not have those devices. We want to make sure that that is not a barrier to entry.”
The study hall program is a pilot program that will last one year. After that, the state General assembly might actually look at funding something similar statewide.